


Like an Owl in the Night

by Rivine



Category: Zone Blanche | Black Spot (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Comes Back Wrong, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Grief/Mourning, Horror, Mutual Pining, Undead, Unresolved Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:40:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21821584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivine/pseuds/Rivine
Summary: There's something in Hermann's house that shouldn't be, and it's hunting him.
Relationships: Louis Hermann/Camille Laugier
Comments: 7
Kudos: 8
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Like an Owl in the Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StopTalkingAtMe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/gifts).



> I've said which fairy tale this was inspired by in the end notes, in case you don't want any plot spoilers.

Camille died in the bog, under the shadow of crows’ wings and dark clouds. Her life bled out into the cold, brown water and something else slipped in, rising with the mist and following the hard, sharp curves of the antler piercing her. It sank through her flesh and into her bones like a stain, as Camille herself drifted away.

Her body was buried next to her grandparents’ plot, in ground sodden from rain. The thing inside clawed its way out of the coffin and up through the heavy mud.

***

Hermann heard the click of the door latch, loud and sharp against the soft ticking of the living room clock. A rush of sudden fear gripped him, even as his mind tried to rationalize away the sound: he had finally fallen asleep after endless tossing and turning and had dreamed it. Or else it had been a branch, grown too close to the house and tapping one of its twigs against a window. But his gut insisted it was a person, and he knew none of his friends would show up at his door unannounced at this time of night.

Camille might have, but she couldn’t anymore, and the pain of his grief stabbed at him the way it always did, a flash of pain cutting through everything else. He did his best to push it aside and focus.

Hermann shifted, hardly breathing, and slowly reached for the drawer of his nightstand. He eased the it open and felt for the cold security of his gun. The creak of a floorboard hit him like an electric shock, and in the sudden calm, crystalized certainty that he was fighting for his life and any mistake could be his last, Hermman held his breath and waited until he had the drawer open wide enough to draw his pistol silently.

Another creak—closer now, the intruder had covered some of the distance without making a sound—came as he rolled onto his side to face the door of his bedroom. He pushed the covers down, freeing his torso and then carefully kicking it off so he could swing his legs over the side of the bed and sit up when the time came. Trying to rise now would only send up a chorus of squeaking bedsprings.

Hermann breathed as slowly and steadily as he could, with the pistol held tight. The display on his alarm clock was the only light: a dim, green 23:34 blinking into 23:35, then 23:36, as Hermann waited.

A floorboard groaned quietly, but it was down the hallway past his bedroom, almost at the bathroom. Whoever it was stalking through his house had silently bypassed his door.

Hermann knew he had left the door slightly ajar when he went to bed, but there had been no sliver of light shining through the crack, only the darkness of the hallway. It was black as pitch outside, with a new moon and cloudy skies, and Hermann never left any lights on at night. And yet, the person was creeping through his house without a flashlight, and that sent a frisson of nameless fear down Hermann’s back.

He waited in breathless silence for the footsteps to return, to come back down the hallway and pause, before the whisper of the door’s hinges moving and the moment when Hermann would find out how quick he was. But no sound came, and the door stayed as it was. When finally the floor groaned again, Hermann felt as if his heart had stopped. It wasn’t from down the hallway, or even right in front of his door; it came from the living room. The intruder had slipped passed his bedroom, and from the sporadic creaks of the floorboards, was wandering seemingly aimlessly through the living room and kitchen.

Hermann hesitated, caught between an urge to rise and force the confrontation—to take control by seeking out the danger—and the awareness that if he did so, he would surely alert whoever it was in his house before he had a clear shot. He lay there, reluctantly obeying his wiser instincts, and waited.

A sudden creak right outside his bedroom was the only warning he got before the door swung open. Hermann pushed himself up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and raising his gun in one smooth motion. He fired two shots quickly, at where he guessed the figure’s chest would be, and then another lower, in case he had aimed too high.

It kept coming. Hermann could almost feel it more than see it. There was only a slightly deeper, inkier shadow in the darkness, and a sense in the air of something charging at him.

Hermann squeezed off two more rounds, the crack of the gun loud enough to drown out the hammering of his heartbeat in his ears. It was still moving, even though _surely_ Hermann must have hit it, and he could make out the shape of reaching arms in the dim, sickly glow of his alarm clock.

Hermann took his last shot, emptying the chamber square into the dark space between the hands raised towards him. The creature—a distant, shock-cold and clinical part of his mind registered that he had given up thinking of the thing as a person—lunged forward.

The weak light of the alarm clock briefly washed over pale hair and a human face, and then it was gone. The light still glowed—24:00 lit up as green and steady as ever—but the thing had vanished. There was no figure, no monstrous shape racing towards him like an owl in the night, only silence and the smell of gunpowder.

Hermann, his chest tight enough he could have choked to death on thin air, hastily switched on his bedside lamp. The room was empty. There were splintered bullet holes in the door—two at head-height, four at the chest, just where he had aimed them—but that was all.

Hermann slowly approached the door, trying to make sense of what had happened. A group of little puddles on the floor stopped him. It looked as if someone had spilled a glass of water while running, but when Hermann crouched down, the water was dingy brown and smelled of stagnant marsh water.

***

Camille didn’t know where she was. She was surrounded by a grey mist that swirled and eddied in a breeze she couldn’t feel, and it clung so close to her that she couldn’t see beyond the reach of her fingertips. It was so fine she could barely feel the water droplets, and yet her skin was damp and cold from it.

She was standing in still water up to her knees, and everything stank of mud and decay. The bottom was soft and uneven under her feet, and each step she took churned up the smell of rotting plants. The water was still, except for the sloshing when she moved.

“Hello?” she called out, but her voice was swallowed up by the fog. She tried shouting, but there was no answer. After a while she gave up, and instead stumbled forward quietly, her arms stretched out in front of her. A small part of her wanted to call Hermann's name, but the rest of her knew that was ridiculous.

Camille was completely alone, and, a voice inside her said, now she had truly lost everyone.

***

From the first darkening in the evening sky, Hermann laid in wait. A creature had come after him. In his own home, in his own damn bed, he had been stalked and found. Hermann didn’t know how he had survived the encounter—when it had had him trapped and out of ammunition—but he knew he was not a mouse, and this barn owl would find that out if it came back.

He had moved furniture around in the living room to create a makeshift barrier at the beginning of the hallway, and set himself up behind it. It was easy to see what he had done from the door, and it was painting a target on himself as much giving him cover. If it were Hermann coming into this house to kill the occupant, he would simply duck back behind the door jam and open fire on the chairs and up-ended table as soon as he saw it. But the thing had lunged at him with bare hands, not even holding a knife or bat, let alone a gun, and it wandered through his house with a senselessness that spoke of no human planning or thought. If it was as mindless as it had seemed, it likely wouldn’t understand what the barricade meant.

Hermann had his pistol, his rifle, and a stack of extra magazines for the pistol. He had put a few extra rifle cartridges in his pocket, but didn’t expect to have the time to reload before switching to the handgun. The thing was frighteningly fast.

He waited as the shadows lengthened and the light drained from the grey sky. The floor creaked under him when he shifted to keep his knees from stiffening up under him. It grew darker and darker. The clock on the wall ticked off the hours slowly, steadily.

At last, the latch rattled. It had finally come.

His finger moved to the trigger, resting lightly on it as the latch clicked open and door swung in from clumsy, stuttering pushes.

Hermann had left one lamp on, in the corner where its light would fall into the crack of the opening door. A hand—grey and mottled—was exposed.

The light shone on its fingernails, which grew out in great, curved claws. They were wickedly sharp, like the talons of a bird of prey. It was all too easy to picture what those claws could do to human flesh, and between that thought and the disturbing surreality of the bird-like claws on a human hand, an icy chill ran down Hermann’s spine and curled in his stomach.

The dim shape of an arm in a dark sleeve slid into view, and Hermann fired. He had a clear shot at where the creature’s body must be, in the darkness outside the opening door, and he knew his bullet had hit its mark. But the creature only came forward faster, shoving open the door as it lunged inside.

It was Camille. Her hair was bedraggled and streaked with mud, as were her clothes. Her face was wrong, in a way that horrified Hermann even more than the vicious claws at her fingertips had. The shape of it was unchanged; it was still her features, whole and unaltered. Still a beautiful woman—a pretty girl, he always reminded himself, because it was Camille and it was best that he think of her that way—but also jarringly inhuman. There was nothing of her behind her eyes, nothing but a blank, empty intent in the way her mouth hung half-open in a silent snarl.

Numb and acting on autopilot, Hermann fired the second round at Camille's chest. It left a hole in her sweater, but she kept running without even a flinch.

Hermann dropped the rifle and raised his pistol, firing off round after round to no effect. He didn’t bother reaching for a new magazine when he ran out, just dropped the gun and bolted for his bedroom.

He could hear her shoving and stumbling against the barricade as he slammed the door closed behind him. He dragged across the desk he had cleared off and positioned next to the door in preparation for just such a retreat.

Something solid slammed into the door. Hermann could feel the desk jolting as he fumbled for the switch and turned on the light. It was glaringly bright at first, and the shock of it jarred him out of the daze that had overcome him when he saw Camille’s dirt-stained face.

Hermann had seen Camille lying still and cold, and he had watched her coffin be lowered into the waiting earth. He couldn’t fool himself into believing that she was any more alive now than she had been on the morgue slab. The claws on her hands weren’t human, but even worse was the flat vacancy in her stare.

He had been reminded of an owl, the previous night when all he had seen was a glimpse of her cheek and mouth. But the barn owls, even though they could be as silent as ghosts, were still living animals. There was a mind, however simple or strange, behind that white, heart-shaped face and wide, watching eyes. There was none of that in Camille's face. Even the fish he caught had more life in their eyes than she did.

It was like a mockery of his wife's death. First he had been forced to watch his wife slowly fade away until she was lying still and unresponsive, and only later did the doctors officially declare what he'd already known: she was gone. Now Camille was here, walking, running, pounding on the door, and yet he knew bone-deep that she herself was nowhere in that body.

Alive, Camille had never had an expression like that. Not when she was dog tired from studying after a long day at the gendarmerie, or on the rare occasions when Hermann had seen her blind drunk, or the times she had languished on his sofa with the flu. Her face could never have looked as it did now. This creature stared at him with the eyes of a dead thing.

“Camille?” Hermann called anyway, while leaning against the desk. The pounding at the door continued without pause, broken only by thin, high rasps, like the sound of claws being dragged down wood. “Camille,” he said again, but he was talking to himself. The creature didn’t speak a word, or even pant or snarl like an animal would.

He thought something in him was breaking, as he stood listening to the clawing of whatever creature Camille’s body had become. The real Camille had torn apart his heart, not only with her death but with the betrayal—the lies and the coverup and the killing—and now this twisted, monstrous version of her had come to tear apart the rest of him. How could he bear it, even if the door held and he lived through the night?

Hermann tried not to think about it, as the door shuddered and creaked under the creature’s relentless attacks. He didn’t know how much more the door could take—there were splintering sounds now every time the creature’s claws dragged down the wood—when suddenly the pounding and scratching stopped. Hermann waited for it to resume, or for the creak of floorboards, but there wasn’t a whisper of noise coming from beyond the door.

It was as if the creature had melted away into nothing, just as it did the previous night when it was lunging towards him. Hermann glanced at his alarm clock. 24:01. Midnight, and it was gone.

***

Camille stumbled on endlessly, through the cold, reeking water and swirling mist. However far she walked, whichever direction she went, nothing changed. Tussocks of grass and weeds emerged dimly through the grey fog and then disappeared back into it. The smell of decomposing vegetation was all around her, heavy and sharp. There was no change in the weak, filtered light, and Camille couldn’t tell how long she had been walking, or even whether there was a sun to rise and set at all.

She knew she had died. Camille had no illusions that she had somehow survived the antler tines that cut into her like knives, nor that she had earned herself a spot in any afterlife she would enjoy. She had done too much for that—Cora would have added the third strike against Camille’s tally.

And now here Camille was, dead and with nothing to do but think on it as she waded through the hellish bog. Everyone else would find out what she had done. Cora would tell them. She’d tell Teddy Bear and Leïla that Camille had killed Laurène. And she’d tell Hermann that while he was training Camille, encouraging her, telling her she would do him proud—while he was doing all that, she was lying to his face because she had become a killer.

She wished it had been the girl who died, not her. Cora would have weighed heavily on her conscience, but after Marion’s death hadn’t she managed to tell the grieving Steiners the right sympathetic words, and joined the search parties looking for the corpse she had hidden? Hadn’t she steeled herself after dragging Laurène’s body off the road, and acted friendly with her daughter, knowing she might have to then kill her too? Just because she had still been trying to figure out to live with the guilt didn’t mean she couldn't have learned.

And Hermann could have never known what she'd done.

***

Hermann woke to a morning half-gone and the strange darkness of boarded up windows. He had put up plywood the previous day, in case the creature tried to come in through the glass, and now he was struck by the thought of Camille, her claws screeching on the panes and her empty face pressed up against it. Revulsion made his stomach twist.

He went to the El Dorado. It was quiet, with only Sabine at the bar. He asked for coffee, and when she brought it, he added, “And a room for the night.”

Even he could hear how false his casual tone rang, and Sabine stopped, and put her palms flat on the bar.

“Why would you need one of my rooms?” she asked, bluntly.

“What does it matter?” he demanded back. He had, in a brief moment early in the morning after the first night, considered calling Laurène or Teddy Bear. He had decided against it, and after last night, couldn’t possibly do it now. “You’ve let Siriani have one for months.”

“He doesn’t live here,” Sabine said. “You do. So why don’t you want to sleep in your own house?”

Hermann hedged, and blustered, and finally, once Sabine had brought out the bottle and two tumblers and he had drunk down the first pour, he told her.

She gave him a long, measuring look.

“If you’re thinking I’ve lost it,” Hermann said, tired and feeling every one of his years settled onto his bones, “I haven’t. Not that I blame you. I know it sounds crazy.”

Sabine didn’t answer, only bent down and reached for something under the countertop. With a clunk, she set a pair a bolt cutters down in front of Hermann.

“What's this for?” he asked.

Sabine nodded at the bolt cutters. “For the claws,” she told him.

“What?” he asked again.

“The claws are a problem. So if you want to fix it, you have to cut them off.” Sabine studied him again, her face grave. “It won’t be easy. For you or her. And Louis, if you both make it, tell her that Gérald Steiner isn’t the only one she owes.”

***

It was with both giddy relief and a flash of pure terror that Camille felt something change. After what might have been an eternity of wandering through endless marsh, with every step near-identical to the last, the shift in the mist was like stepping on a hot coal. The fog was curling and eddying faster, snaking around her like a gale had whipped up. She still couldn’t feel the air moving against her skin.

The mist twisted and writhed, and she realized it was also getting brighter. Before, it had been a dull, steely grey, and now it had paled to ash, and when she looked up, it was brighter above her. There was even a sense of light shining through, getting stronger and stronger.

The chaotic swirling of the mist began to stabilize, to settle into a single stream flowing around and around her, until she was at the center of a whirling cyclone of fog. The light was still brightening, and Camille felt as if the sky—whatever kind of sky there was in such a place—was opening up.

She didn’t like that feeling. It was like being a moth caught under a lamp or—she couldn’t suppress the memory in time—when the crows had mobbed her. An urgent desire to escape made her stumble forward desperately, but the cage of wind she couldn’t feel moved with her. She turned, searching all directions around her, but couldn’t see any sign of a gap or weak spot in the cyclone.

There was nowhere for her to go. There was nothing to shelter under, not even the most ragged of bushes to crouch beside. She was exposed, and it terrified her.

Camille balked. She wasn’t going to stand here and wait for whatever was going to happen to her, for whatever fate was about to descend from on high. She would rather fight and scramble for one last chance at control, however desperate and doomed an attempt it was.

She took the only route left to her, and sank to her knees in the water. She bent and plunged her whole body under the murky water. It closed over her head in a cold rush, and she was immersed in the bog. She closed her eyes tightly on instinct, but the water was so coffee-dark with sediment and tannins that it could hardly matter.

Even while she was making it, she knew it was a wild, impulsive decision. She had only the length of one breath before she had to surface, and surely the whirlwind and whatever judgement it heralded would be waiting when she did so. Still, she tried to press her body flat to the bottom, as if she could hide in the muck. But as she kicked and reached down for the mud, her fingers groped fruitlessly. The water had been barely to her hips, and yet now she couldn’t find the bottom.

She kicked harder, diving deeper and deeper. She should have hit mud long ago, and that she hadn’t was creating a new fear, but stubbornly she kept going. She had started, and now here she was, and she was damned if she wouldn’t see it through to the end. She would swim as far down as she could, into whatever strange depths had opened up beneath her.

The water seemed endless. It was still and cold all around her, and at last, expecting to see only darkness, she opened her eyes. She was nearly blinded by the light. It was the golden, welcoming light of lightbulbs, and after spending a period of time she couldn’t even begin to measure wandering through the grey, dismal marshes, Camille was dazzled by it.

There was a faint silvery sheen rippling over the light, like the skin of an air bubble, and Camille clawed her way through the water toward it. Her reaching hands broke through, and there was warmth on her fingers, and then her arms, and her face. It tingled painfully on her skin, but it was the feeling of cold-deadened flesh coming back to life, and Camille could have cried with relief.

At first it was all she could do just to experience the light and the heat again, but gradually the blazing light resolved into a ceiling lamp, and the warmth into someone holding her.

“Camille? Come on, wake up. You need to pull it together, now.”

It was Hermann’s voice. She looked up at him, confused. She was half lying on the ground, with Hermann kneeling beside her and holding her up with an arm under her back. He looked terribly afraid.

“Hermann? What… you’re bleeding.” There were tears in his shirt, revealing thin red gashes streaking his chest. “Luis, you need a doctor.”

“Oh, thank fuck.”

He hugged her tightly, and only then did she notice that he had both of her wrists gripped in his hands, and her fingers were bloody.

“I’m fine, Camille. I’m fine.”

***

Camille came back to life in Hermann’s house, under the lights he had left on for her, with his blood still warm and bright between them.

**Author's Note:**

> This is loosely inspired by the French fairy tale La Ramée and the Phantom.


End file.
